IntroductionDuring the fallout from the Boston bombings in April 2013, the city's mayor highlighted the resilience shown by the people of Boston. He celebrated the fact that Boston was a 'resilient city' that would bounce back (Menino, 2013). Numerous media commentaries, blog posts and online memorials picked up this theme of resilience to articulate a range of positive attributes that individuals/Boston/America had exhibited. They had been brave, quick thinking, a strong community and yet, at the same time, calm and able to follow instructions from the security forces that amassed and co-operated. Resilience, it seems, carried both popular appeal and policy relevance in a manner that allowed security objectives to shift, adapt, andaccording to media narrative -move quickly in relation to the event, the perpetrators and the political challenges that were arising.Much like the concept of globalisation that rose to popularity in the 1980s and 1990s, resilience seems to carry a productive ambiguity that both resists exact definition and allows for a spectrum of interactions and engagements between policy and the everyday which are as (seemingly) effective as they are (apparently) apolitical.What is resilience? How did it emerge? What are the political effects of this emergence? The ambition of this special issue is to outline an agenda for research into resilience that emphasises how we might address the status of politics and the political in relation to this discourse of security. In many ways, this is a highly unconventional and therefore distinctive collection of articles. For a start, it is unusual in combining both academic and practitioner perspectives, a quality that we believe to be increasingly important in order to understand the complexity of issues at stake in the rise of resilience. The special issue is also marked by a deliberate eclecticism in terms of authors' theoretical and methodological approaches, the type of sources they use and ultimately their normative attitudes towards resilience, per se. As is to be expected, we find moments of tension as well as agreement between the pieces assembled here but, for us, this only enhances the collection as a whole by openly exploring the multifaceted -and highly political -nature of resilience.Some of the articles contribute to existing debates by diversifying the policy contexts in which the politics of resilience can be analysed, including: international peacekeeping, humanitarian intervention and human security (Chandler, 2013;Williams, 2013); the maintenance and bs_bs_banner

This article critically examines the performative politics of resilience in the context of the current UK Civil Contingencies (UKCC) agenda. It places resilience within a wider politics of (in)security that seeks to govern risk by folding uncertainty into everyday practices that plan for, pre-empt, and imagine extreme events. Moving beyond existing diagnoses of resilience based either on ecological adaptation or neoliberal governmentality, we develop a performative approach that highlights the instability, contingency, and ambiguity within attempts to govern uncertainties. This performative politics of resilience is investigated via two case studies that explore 1) Critical National Infrastructure protection and 2) Humanitarian Emergency Preparedness. By drawing attention to the particularities of how resilient knowledge is performed and what it does in diverse contexts, we repoliticise resilience as an ongoing, incomplete, and potentially self-undermining discourse.

Emerging scholarship on global governance offers ever-more detailed analyses of private regulatory regimes. These regimes aim to regulate some area of social activity without a mandate from, or participation of, states or international organizations. While there are numerous empirical studies of these regimes, the normative theoretical literature has arguably struggled to keep pace with such developments. This is unfortunate, as the proliferation of private regulatory regimes raises important issues about legitimacy in global governance. The aim of this paper is to address some of these issues by elaborating a theoretical framework that can orientate normative investigation of these schemes. It does this through turning to the idea of experimentalist governance. It is argued that experimentalism can provide an important and provocative set of insights about the processes and logics of emerging governance schemes. The critical purchase of this theory is illustrated through an application to the case of primary commodities roundtables, part of ongoing attempts by NGOs, producers, and buyers to set sustainability criteria for commodity production across a range of sectors. The idea of experimentalist governance, we argue, can lend much needed theoretical structure to debates about the normative legitimacy of private regulatory regimes.

The paper develops a critical analysis of deliberative approaches to global governance. After first defining global governance and with a minimalist conception of deliberation in mind, the paper outlines three paradigmatic approaches: liberal, cosmopolitan, and critical. The possibilities and problems of each approach are examined and a common concern with the scope for “deliberative reflection” in global governance is addressed. It is argued that each approach, to varying degrees, foregrounds the currently underdetermined state of knowledge about global governance, its key institutions, agents, and practices. In doing so, the question “What is global governance?” is retained as an important and reflective element of ongoing deliberative practices. It is suggested that this constitutes the distinctive and vital insight of deliberative approaches to global governance.

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